I'll See You When I Fall Asleep

Chapter 6

The night was the enemy.

Each attempt at closing her eyes and drifting back to sleep was thwarted by visions of the girl with the freckled face. It was as if each time she closed her eyes a different snapshot of the Dream came into focus. Cammie would go mad if she stayed in bed and listened to the silence.

But every thought of movement, of action, seemed to crippled her even further. Her heart hammered so rapidly she felt she would wake the whole block with its drumming. It was beating as fast as the wheels in her head were spinning, the two working in unison, a machine created to hold her into place with the weight of anxiety pinning her down. With each second that ticked by she felt her limbs growing heavier and heavier, being crushed. The weight in her belly that seemed to be disseminating a numbing sensation through her body seemed to grow thicker and more malicious.

Cammie tried to think herself through the situation: meditate, control her breathing, and rationalize. But what was there to rationalize? She could not think away the Dream. It was the Dream. The Dream was never wrong. It had never been wrong. Yet she had never wanted to be more wrong in her entire life. She would give up everything to be wrong tonight.

She thought of Adam, of his reaction. She thought of their future. It was like a mirror, reflecting falsely what Cammie thought should have been, only to be shattered moments before she could reach through to grasp it.

Adam.

Though Cammie had spent months deflecting the idea that she could Dream of anyone but Adam, a small part of her had been prepared for it, knew it could be a possibility. She knew she could have faced Adam in the event that she had not dreamed of him. But this situation was entirely different. She could have told him the truth if she had dreamed of another man.

Another man.

Adam would have understood. He would have been crushed, of course, and so would she; but in two months, when he turned twenty-one and gazed upon the face of the woman he would spend the rest of his life with, he would have been okay. They both would have, hard as it would have been. Cammie liked to imagine that they would have stayed friends, even.

But this? A woman? How could she even explain it? She wasn't gay, she had never been attracted to a woman, she had never thought about women that way. These things did not just happen. She had known about people being gay, celebrities, people at her high school and college. That was something those people knew about themselves as soon as they became aware of sexuality. They knew they were different, knew they had no interest in the opposite sex. And that was okay for them—it was strange—but Cammie didn't care what other people did. She cared about she did. She knew the types of judgement cast upon those people, especially by her own family. She did not want that for herself. She couldn't handle that for herself.

Cammie just wanted Adam, wanted her life to be normal, wanted to make her family proud. Could anyone be proud of her if she returned home with a woman on her arm? Pure panic drilled through her core as she imagined the expression that her mother would conjure up. When Cammie's younger sister told the family she was going to major in art in college, a major that was considered to be a ridiculous waste of time, money, and talent by their mother, she was practically disowned. What would the Driver family do to Cammie if they found out she dreamed of a woman?

Cammie began reel through her past, looking for any indication that she had missed something. Had their been any friendships out of the ordinary? Had there been any weird interactions between her and another girl?

The panicked search for answers yielded no results and Cammie was left wondering what could have gone wrong.

The Dream is wrong! She screamed at herself. It was the Dream, it wasn't her.